Film review

  • A Pale View of Hills

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Toi yama-nami no hikari

    Kei Ishikawa (2025)

    Kazuo Ishiguro’s most popular novels were soon adapted for cinema.  Overrated as a book and as a film, The Remains of the Day was published in 1989 with the Merchant-Ivory movie released four years later.  Never Let Me Go, published in 2005, sold equally well as a novel; Mark Romanek’s underrated film version, which came out in 2010, fared less well, commercially and critically.  It has taken far longer for Ishiguro’s fine debut novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), to reach the screen.  When I re-read it recently, in anticipation of watching Kei Ishikawa’s film, the appeal and the difficulty of dramatising the book weren’t hard to see.  The nature of the source material virtually guarantees that attempts to make a film of it will be intriguing, but Ishikawa’s version of A Pale View of Hills is almost entirely unsatisfying.

    Until the late 1950s, Etsuko, the book’s first-person narrator, lived in Nagasaki with her first husband, Jiro; in 1952 she gave birth to a daughter, Keiko. By the time she emigrated to England, where her second daughter, Niki, was born, Etsuko was married to a British man.  In the early 1980s, she’s a widow living alone in rural southern England.  Keiko, who moved away from home to Manchester, recently committed suicide.  Niki, who lives in London, visits her mother for a few days.  During the visit, Etsuko recalls the summer when she was pregnant with her first child.  Her recollections are prompted in part by Niki’s eagerness to know more from her mother about the family history, with a view to writing about it (Niki has vague literary ambitions), but Etsuko’s Nagasaki memories focus chiefly on her short-lived friendship with Sachiko, a woman of about her own age.  Sachiko, a single parent with a ten-year-old daughter, Mariko, is in a relationship with Frank, an American serviceman.  She intends that she and Mariko will soon travel with Frank to the US and make their home there.  Mariko is vehemently opposed to the idea.

    Etsuko proves an unreliable narrator – the means whereby Ishiguro fashions an impressively ambiguous story.  There are striking resonances throughout A Pale View of Hills between the thirty-years-apart halves of the narrative.  In conversation, polite, determinedly obliging Etsuko is often on the receiving end from a brusquely opinionated interlocutor – Jiro as well as Sachiko in the 1950s, Niki in the 1980s.  If, in response, she qualifies or apologises for something she has said, Sachiko and Niki are liable to reproach Etsuko for her kneejerk acquiescence (as they see it).  Sachiko’s plans to start a new life in a new country, with a non-Japanese man, clearly chime with what will happen to Etsuko herself.  (It’s not explained how her marriage to chauvinist Jiro ended but one assumes it was in divorce.)  The chief link emerging from the two time periods is an uncooperative and introverted daughter.  The tensions between Sachiko and headstrong, friendless Mariko, expressed most strongly in the little girl’s opposition to Frank and the future that he threatens, are clear from an early stage.  The reader learns more gradually how Keiko, growing up in England, became increasingly unhappy and reclusive.

    By the novel’s end, the combination of these resonances has both clarified things and made them more uncertain.  It’s clear that Etsuko feels deep remorse for bringing Keiko to England – that she is thereby to blame for her first daughter’s troubled life and suicide:  at one point, Etsuko tells Niki that Niki’s father ‘really believed we could give [Keiko] a happy life over here … but … I knew all along she wouldn’t be happy’.  It becomes clear enough too that Etsuko’s Nagasaki memories are shadowed by her present state of mind, but it’s hard to say quite how much these memories are reshaped by what became of Keiko.  Etsuko remembers public alarm in Nagasaki about a series of unsolved child murders.  When wilful Mariko goes missing one night, Etsuko, rather than Sachiko, voices fears for the child’s safety.  This develops into a recurring pattern in the narrative.  Etsuko is repeatedly scolded by Sachiko for worrying unnecessarily; the experienced mother keeps telling the expecting mother she’ll need to change her ways once she has a child of her own.  Although one assumes the serial killings aren’t Etsuko’s invention, their main purpose in the story is to contrast Etsuko’s and Sachiko’s attitudes and create tension between them.  This is just one example of Ishiguro’s use of Etsuko’s narration to blur the boundary between what really happened in 1952 and how she views her past in hindsight.

    The book’s attractions as a potential film include Ishiguro’s expressive descriptions of locale, and the ease with which cinema can move between different times and places.  A filmmaker’s chief challenge comes in whether to retain an unreliable narrator and, if not, how instead to tell the story.  Kei Ishikawa, who wrote the screenplay for his film, deserves credit for not taking what might seem the easy option of Etsuko’s voiceover, but his choice of alternative is, in effect, muddled rather than mysterious.  In the novel, Niki, although temporarily present in her mother’s life in 1982, isn’t a major character.  She comes over as irritable and, despite professed interest in her mother’s past, somewhat disengaged; she returns to London well before the novel ends.  Ishikawa makes Niki a more central character – it’s she who comes to seem to be writing her mother’s story.  Even though she and Etsuko don’t have much conversation in the film about the past, Niki is several times shown tapping away on a typewriter.  She also features in several sequences from which Etsuko is absent.  Each of these sequences is, like the typewriter, a clumsy cliché.

    A phone call Niki makes to London, early in the film, presents her as a more established writer than in the novel.  She has been researching the anti-nuclear protests currently taking place at Greenham Common but the male voice on the other end of the phone line, either her publisher or her agent, suggests she use her family background to write about surviving a nuclear attack, though he stupidly confuses Nagasaki with Hiroshima.  It’s also clear from this phone conversation that he’s having an affair with Niki, and that he’s married; a bit later, Niki is in the bathroom doing a pregnancy test.  Her mother has put the house on the market; Etsuko is out when an estate agent calls and Niki shows him round.  The main point of this exchange is presumably to point up that, when he first visited the house, Etsuko wouldn’t let the estate agent see what was Keiko’s old bedroom – a point rather lost by the agent’s giving the impression, in what he says to Niki, that he’s not familiar with the house at all.  The action isn’t cliché-free even with Etsuko in the picture.  An exchange of cross words between her and Niki culminates in mother slapping daughter’s face – which seems entirely out of character for Etsuko.

    The legacies of Japanese defeat and of the atomic bomb attack on Nagasaki in 1945 come through strongly but never over-emphatically in Ishiguro’s story.  The post-war American occupation of Japan is represented by Frank, but he’s never seen by Etsuko and is talked about only by Sachiko and Mariko.  The latter often mentions to Etsuko a woman ‘across the river’; this mysterious figure, according to Sachiko, derives from an incident in Tokyo during the war, when she and Mariko saw a woman who had drowned her own baby then killed herself.  Jiro’s widowed father, Ogata, a retired schoolmaster, who visits Jiro and Etsuko, is much offended by a recent educational journal article by one of his former pupils, Shigeo Matsuda, deploring Ogata’s teaching and naming him as typical of the imperialist mindset that prevailed in 1930s Japan and led the country into a war that proved a national catastrophe.  Jiro, who fought in the war, is annoyed having his father as a house guest when he’s so busy at work.  As his son becomes more offhand and impatient, so Ogata’s obsession with Matsuda grows, and Etsuko eventually accompanies her father-in-law to Matsuda’s place of work.

    Although Ishikawa retains these elements, his treatment of them tends to be relatively crude.  Frank is briefly glimpsed in the film, to the accompaniment of local women reviling Sachiko for consorting with the enemy.  In the book, Ogata’s face-to-face meeting with Shigeo Matsuda leads the old man to climb down and reproach himself; in the film (in another scene sans Etsuko), Ogata is angrily confrontational.  It therefore makes less sense that he then immediately decides to end his visit and return, defeated, to his lonely life in Fukuoka.  Ishikawa distorts or abbreviates other strands or episodes to an extent that makes it hard to see why he retained them at all:  Sachiko’s part-time employment at a noodle joint; Jiro’s arriving home late with two drunken work colleagues; a day out for Etsuko, Sachiko and Mariko in Nagasaki.  The several stages of this excursion are a cumulatively important part of Etsuko’s apparently real memories in Ishiguro’s narrative.  Mariko’s memorable encounter with an obnoxious young boy during the day trip becomes almost perfunctory in the film.

    Some visual facets work well.  A rope motif in the Nagasaki scenes anticipates Keiko’s suicide by hanging.  Suzi Hirose (as the younger Etsuko) and Fumi Nikaido (Sachiko) don’t closely resemble each other, but Ishikawa and his cinematographer, Piotr Niemyjski, sometimes shoot their faces at angles that call to mind the face of the older Etsuko (Yoh Yoshida), conveying a sense of her being a combination of the two younger women.  Late on, Niki (Camilla Aiko) looks through a family album and pauses at a photo of Keiko in the 1950s.  It’s a photo of the same little girl (Mio Suzuki) we’ve been watching as Mariko – hardly subtle but effective as a clear message to the audience.  Ishikawa’s shallow faithfulness to the original novel is always in conflict, though, with Niki’s prominence in the story (Camilla Aiko’s unnuanced acting doesn’t help) – and never more so than in the film’s closing stages.

    After the photograph album revelation, Ishikawa briefly and unfortunately returns to Nagasaki in 1952, where Etsuko, now wearing a dress recognisable as one worn previously by Sachiko, addresses the girl who was Mariko as Keiko.  Is the idea that we’re now seeing the reality of the past, and that Sachiko and Mariko were figments of Etsuko’s remorseful imagination?   Surely not:  for a start, it would reduce Frank to a proxy for Etsuko’s future ‘foreign’ husband (and the whole US occupation dimension of the story to very little).  More likely, this moment is meant to show that Niki now understands, as she didn’t before, her mother’s feelings about bringing Keiko to England and painfully guilty conscience.  This may be implied too in Niki’s insisting to Etsuko, before returning to London, that what happened to her sister ‘wasn’t your fault’.  But those words ring hollow – especially since Niki, irritated that her mother wants her to start a family, also takes this opportunity to remind Etsuko that there’s more to life than having children, which prompts Etsuko to ask out loud what more.  These exchanges serve chiefly as a reminder that unsympathetic Niki is part of her mother’s present loneliness.  Kei Ishikawa’s decision to work Niki into the storytelling – and compete with Etsuko as the central consciousness of A Pale View of Hills – was the wrong decision.  He has turned Kazuo Ishiguro’s deft, elusive writing into heavy-handed cinema.

    13 March 2026

     

  • The Testament of Ann Lee

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mona Fastvold (2025)

    It’s hard not to respect Mona Fastvold’s ambition and strength of purpose in making a musical biopic about an eighteenth-century religious pioneer who opposed marriage in the belief that Adam and Eve’s original sin was fornication.  Harder still not to find the result tiresome and often ridiculous.  The numerous song and dance bits – repetitious chants with matching choreography, performed by Ann Lee and her fellow Shakers – are one reason why but, to be fair, they’re also part of The Testament of Ann Lee’s more imaginative qualities.  Fastvold’s literal-mindedness can be just as much a problem.  For example, every time someone on horseback appears on the screen (which is quite often), an equine noise arrives on the soundtrack.  ‘Horse whinnies’, the film’s audio description dutifully records; occasionally, to ring the changes, ‘Horse whinnies and neighs’.

    Born in Manchester in 1736, Ann Lee works as a child in a cotton factory and, a few years later, as a hospital cook.  Under the influence of Jane and James Wardley, local Quakers, Ann becomes devoutly religious.  She marries Abraham Standerin, who’s also part of the Wardleys’ circle, and is soon a leading member of the ‘shaking Quakers’, so named for their ecstatic, highly dynamic form of worship.  When she and others disrupt a conventional church service, Ann is arrested and imprisoned for fourteen days, during which time she refuses to eat or drink, has a vision of herself levitating, and perceives where Adam and Eve went wrong.  The Wardleys have already been preaching that Christ’s Second Coming will be in female form.  On her release from prison, Ann shares her insights with co-religionists; all decide she must be the awaited female Messiah.  When this claim generates more local hostility, Ann and her followers decide to leave England and head for New England.

    For the film’s audience, Ann’s revelation that sexual intercourse is fundamentally wrong isn’t a bolt from the blue.  As children, Ann (Millie Rose Crossley) and her younger brother William (Harry Conway) sleep in the same room as their mother (Maria Sand) and father (Willem van der Vegt).  When pre-teen Ann catches sight of her parents making love one night, she’s horrified.  During a family meal next day, she tells her father that she knows ‘what you do to her’ and he beats his daughter’s hands in punishment.  The adult Ann (Amanda Seyfried) marries Abraham (Christopher Abbott) within a few screen seconds of first seeing him and we naturally wonder if her childhood aversion will lead to problems in the bedroom.  Not at first.  Lying in bed beside Abraham, Ann listens to her husband, a blacksmith by trade but clearly a bookworm by nature, discourse eloquently on his current reading matter – Jean-Baptiste de Boyer’s Thérèse Philosophe (a novel usually classed as French ‘libertine literature’ but significantly anti-Catholic too).  Ann is less content with Abraham’s liking for sexual sadomasochism, but she gives birth to four children.

    All four die as babies.  Mona Fastvold overused the protagonist’s voiceover in her previous film, The World to Come (2020).  She does so again in The Testament of Ann Lee, where the narration is voiced throughout by Ann’s loyal friend, Mary Partington (Thomasin McKenzie).  In The World to Come, Fastvold also had a maddening habit of showing and telling simultaneously:  as her capable actors expressed through face and body what was happening in a scene, Fastvold sometimes had her heroine Abigail explain their feelings in voiceover.  Although that doesn’t quite happen in this latest film, you don’t expect, after being informed by Mary that Ann’s children all died in infancy, then to watch repeated scenes of childbirth and child death.

    As six-year-old Ann (Esmee Hewett) and little William (Benjamin Bagota) head to church, she instructs him to hurry, and he does as he’s told.  Mary’s voice then tells us that, as William learned to keep pace, sister and brother would move ‘in lockstep’.  That hardly describes their future relationship, which sees Ann always making the running, William following in her footsteps.  His obedience extends to sexual abstinence.  In a scene that comes out of nowhere, the man William (Lewis Pullman) and a male lover lie in bed together.  William gets up, telling the other man, ‘We will have to say our farewells tonight. You have been a great friend to me, Jacob’.  William then sits in front of a mirror to cut his long hair.  This presumably symbolises the sloughing off an old, sinful skin before embarking on his new, celibate life.

    Plenty of older siblings order younger ones about, but Ann is a precociously moralising bossyboots:  even as a young girl, she’s telling William, ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place’ – a maxim repeated over the course of Ann Lee, right through to Mary’s closing words, following Ann’s death, at the age of forty-eight, in the Shaker settlement she founded in Niskayuna, New York.  On the sea voyage to America, the Shakers, through their noisy rituals, make themselves unpopular with the captain, crew and other passengers – until the ship is caught in a violent storm but, thanks to the Shakers’ fervent prayers, doesn’t sink.  ‘They were left to pray in peace for the rest of the journey,’ says Mary, although peace isn’t really the word.  I couldn’t suppress the bad thought that some on board might have wondered if the Shakers’ racket wasn’t a fate worse than drowning.

    Perhaps inevitable with this leading lady that Ann Lee is bereft of (intentional) humour, but Mona Fastvold is evidently drawn to solemn female protagonists.  I haven’t seen her first feature, The Sleepwalker (2014), but Abigail in The World to Come, a woman in unhappy circumstances though with little of Ann’s religious conviction, wore her miserable heart on her sleeve.  In press interviews, Fastvold has described the unsurprising difficulties of getting funding for a ‘$10m Shaker musical’.  How did she and her partner Brady Corbet, who shares the screenplay credit with Fastvold, manage it?  Ann Lee and The World to Come could both be termed feminist period pieces (the earlier film is set in the mid-nineteenth century).  Abigail’s misery is relieved by a lesbian romance with a neighbour and Ann, though implacably opposed to sex, isn’t without commercial appeal, as both a victim of patriarchy and a thorn in its side:  accused of heresy in England and witchcraft in Niskayuna, she’s undaunted in claiming to be the new incarnation of Christ.  The sect she leads, despite their espousal of celibacy, advocates gender equality and pacifism.  Fastvold has described her film as a ‘speculative retelling’ of Ann’s story:  on the one hand, she speculates that Abraham, in effect a baddie, sexually exploited Ann deplorably; on the other, that William, a goodie, was naturally gay.  Ticking several woke boxes may have helped sell the project to the production and distribution companies involved.

    Not surprising either that Fastvold shows relatively little interest in Ann’s ability to justify her extraordinary theology.  Abraham accompanies her to America, supposedly because he thinks a blacksmith can make a good living there; for the same reason, he stays in New York City when, soon after the group’s arrival, Ann dispatches William and the other men north to look out land for a settlement.  In their New York lodgings, Abraham, infuriated by Ann’s forswearing of sex, reminds his wife of her marriage vows; in reply, she simply insists that she will ‘never consent to violate my duty to God’.  We also learn from this showdown that Ann can’t read or write, Abraham bitterly demanding to know if her followers ‘know their Mother Ann to be illiterate’ and ‘how does one contribute to scripture if thou cannot stable a quill?’  She doesn’t answer either question.  This set-to marks Abraham’s last appearance in the film, and the matter of Ann’s illiteracy isn’t mentioned again.  Nor is her conviction that Adam and Eve committed fornication in the Garden of Eden, even though God made them ‘one flesh’, ever disputed.  You realise, of course, that Ann relies on personal charisma rather than scriptural expertise to compel her followers to share her belief in salvation through ‘toil and chastity’.  You’re nevertheless aware that this unquestioning obedience to ‘Mother Ann’ suits Mona Fastvold’s purposes.

    Ann does lose, as well as Abraham, a couple of those who made the journey to America with her.  (The Wardleys (Scott Handy and Stacy Martin) stay in Manchester.)  The transatlantic voyage is funded by wealthy farmer John Hocknell (David Cale), a new Shaker recruit.  While at sea, Hocknell’s son Richard (Jamie Bogyo) falls in love with Nancy (Viola Prettejohn), referred to as Ann’s niece (I didn’t understand who Nancy’s parents were).  In New York Nancy and Richard’s romance progresses and they leave Ann to marry.  The Niskayuna population grows, however, thanks to making converts and adopting foundling children.  The last part of Ann Lee majors in the oppression of the Shaker community, especially Ann.  She’s arrested for insisting that the community remain neutral during the American War of Independence.  After being released, she leads a crusade to establish other Shaker settlements in New England.  During a recruitment drive at a farm, several of Ann’s group are killed by a mob.  Ann is injured and stripped by a gang of men who question her gender.  Mary is blinded in one eye during the farm attack, but lives to tell the tale.

    Daniel Blumberg drew on Shaker hymns to write the songs and chants.  I’ve admired his scores for The World to Come and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024) and I guess I admire his work on Ann Lee too, despite finding it far from easy listening.  As she showed as Meryl Streep’s daughter in Mamma Mia! (2008) and as Cosette in Les Misérables (2012), Amanda Seyfried is an accomplished and versatile singer; performing a very different kind of music here, she certainly extends her range.  As befits a child of Meryl Streep, Seyfried also proves in Ann Lee that she can do a foreign accent, yet it’s not completely satisfying.  Seyfried has mastered a Lancashire accent technically but, perhaps because she’s concentrating so hard on maintaining it, doesn’t always get the right rhythm into her lines – though she fares better than her fellow American Lewis Pullman and than David Cale, even though he grew up in England.  Thomasin McKenzie, a New Zealander, copes well with the Lancashire accent:  even though, as already noted, Mary Partington has far too much voiceover, the job of narration means that McKenzie rarely needs to speak colloquially, which probably makes it easier to hold the accent.  The best British actor in the cast is Matthew Beard, though his role, as a young man who is part of the Wardleys’ group then follows Ann to America, doesn’t amount to much.  Daniel Blumberg appears briefly in the New York part of the story, alongside Tim Blake Nelson, as local churchmen that join the Shakers.

    Although the throbbing insistency of the chants gives the film’s musical bits a sexual implication, the Shakers’ commitment to celibacy doomed them inevitably to extinction in the long run.  Fastvold ends The Testament of Ann Lee with the relevant stats on screen.  The Shakers’ energetic efforts to make converts to the cause resulted in a gradual growth of Shaker numbers to a peak of five to six thousand members in the US by the mid-nineteenth century.  Today, there are three active members in the last remaining Shaker village, in Maine.  The film’s full title, also according to on-screen text, is ‘The Testament of Ann Lee or the Woman Clothed by the Sun with the Moon Under Her Feet’ – the latter phrases quoting the Book of Revelation.  The sun isn’t otherwise in evidence much in Mona Fastvold’s film (William Rexer did the cinematography).  Natural light aka darkness reigns almost continuously in Manchester although things brighten up a bit in the New World.

    4 March 2026

     

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